General News
5 May, 2026
Researcher in love with Reef
JUST like nature, Warren Lee Long has a grounding presence.
Growing up in a green town, he came to understand nature as a complex, interconnected system.
“I grew up in Innisfail. The Reef was my front yard and the mountains and rivers were my backyard,” Mr Lee Long said.
“We had access to everything – it was heaven.”
He describes experiencing the Great Barrier Reef as a kind of romance, with each visit deepening his admiration for its complexity.
“When you’re on the Reef, there’s a sense of being on the frontier and the discovery of something new,” Mr Lee Long said.
“It hits you in the face and you just can’t take your eyes off it – you just want to dig deeper.
“I think that might be what drove my fascination to always search for what else is there and to find out what makes it all tick and function.”
That started a lifelong question for Mr Lee Long: how does it all work?
Spending his weekends exploring local rivers, creeks and the Reef, he noticed changes in his environment.
“Our rivers around Innisfail, the North and South Johnstone rivers, would flood every year, with big red flood plumes reaching far out to sea.
“I’d see people catching incredible numbers of fish from the rivers and the Reef and strange changes in bait fish populations on the foreshores.
“And I thought, this can’t go on forever – something is not right.
“I wanted to find out what I could do to help.”
This led Mr Lee Long to study a Bachelor of Science in Marine Biology at James Cook University.
After university, he worked as a biologist studying the relationship between juvenile prawns and seagrass meadows. Not much was understood about seagrass meadows in Queensland at the time.
“I told my boss that to understand the whole system, we need to map how much seagrass we’ve got.
“That led to a whole decade of mapping seagrasses up and down the Great Barrier Reef, the Gulf of Carpentaria and the Torres Strait.”
His work surveying seagrasses became an adventure: at times taking him through dangerous and murky waters, alongside sharks, crocodiles and box jellyfish, to uncover truths within the meadows.
“Despite the risks, it was exciting work – we were discovering many new habitats.”
But the Queensland coastline is thousands of kilometres long and Mr Lee Long’s team were tasked with a mammoth job.
“I felt our little team of four was not enough to cover the whole of Queensland’s seagrass monitoring needs,” he said.
Mr Lee Long set out to find a solution.
Together with fellow researcher Len Mackenzie, he developed Seagrass-Watch, a citizen science program that trains community members to collect and submit scientifically useful data on seagrass meadows.
Seagrass-Watch was the first of its kind to use the collective power of community to help scientists understand seagrasses.
“I designed it to be a collaborative triangle, between citizens, scientists and government managers,” Mr Lee Long said.
Recognising that this multiple-level formula could work on a larger scale, he took the lessons he learned from Seagrass-Watch to the global stage, when he later joined Wetlands International.
Read More: Far North